Nitesh Kadyan (MT2011093) with his 25 Under 25 Award from Campus Diaries
(March)

From the Director's Desk:

The month of March has been very special for IIITB. The new academic block funded by Infosys Foundation has been planned meticulously over the last two months. Architects and contractor for the building have been identified through a fair open tender process. The Bhoomi Pooja (Ground breaking ceremony) was on the 31st of March.

Ms. Daw Mie Mie Khin, the Pro-Rector of Myanmar Institute of Information Technology (MIIT), heading a delegation of five professors from MIIT, visited us to interact with our faculty and to understand some of our best practices in institution building and curriculum planning. IIITB has been the mentor institute for MIIT, since its inception in 2014. Our collaboration has helped MIIT to gain 100% placement for its first outgoing batch of postgraduate diploma in software technology (PGDST) students in 2015.

While there have been highs, there have been lows as well. Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel Inc. and mastermind behind the ubiquitous Intel Inside, passed away on March 21. We mourn the death of an entrepreneur, who was "one of the giants in the technology world", to quote the Apple CEO, Tim Cook. Andy Grove, RIP.

You will find more details in the Newsletter.

HAPPYREADING

ACHIEVEMENTS

Prof. Meenakshi D'Souza received a grant of 21,000/- pounds from Royal Academy of Engineering, UK, to work on a joint research project involving refinement theories for Simulink, in collaboration with Mathworks India Pvt. Ltd. and University of York, UK.

Onkar Hoysala (MS2014003), a research student in IT and Society, was awarded the Sarai Short Term Research Project 2016 fellowship. His research will focus on how software tools for Intelligent Transportation System research, which are often developed in (and for) contexts outside India, shape the work and the research of researchers in Indian contexts. The fellowship is run by the Sarai programme at the Centre for Study of Developing Societies, and invited proposals looking at contemporary social and digital media. Onkar's proposal addressed one of the themes of the call, practice-based research on software. The fellowship will run from March 2016 to August 2016.

Nitesh Kadyan (MT2011093) has been honored as one of the 25 Under 25, an award bestowed by Campus Diaries. Campus Diaries is a platform for creative self-expression, nurturing a community in Bangalore, and connecting campuses for technical and socio-cultural exchanges in campuses across the country and abroad (covering South Asia, UK and USA). In the 25 under 25, which is a talent search event leading to a summit in Bangalore of chosen 100 change-makers, four categories were considered- Writing, Photography, Visual Art & Design, and Science & Technology and they selected 25 people in each category under the age of 25 from around 15000 applicants across India. Nitesh has been selected in Science and Tech category
For details: https://campusdiaries.com/stories/heres-announcing-the-final-list-of-25-under-25-2016

The team bitMAP (Shishir Uniyal (MT2015105), Shubham Gupta (MT2015106), Soumyadip Saha (MT2015110), Subhas Das (MT2015112), Sujit Kumar Muduli (MT2015113)) has participated in the "Mylan Hackathon”on March 19 - 20 at Mylan's Bangalore office and won the 1st place with prize money of INR 3,50,000 /-.The challenge: After a product goes to market, pharmaceutical companies track instances of adverse events and adverse drug reactions for the drugs they manufacture and sell. The challenge is in figuring how potential adverse events/adverse drug reaction notifications can be captured.
bitMAP has proposed to make use of social media data and news feeds to build an Intelligent system Mr.TweetBot collects news feeds and tweets, and filters them based on their semantics. It is designed to keep the relevant data that indicate any adverse drug reaction event. For data analysis, a real-time visualization of company-wise drug reaction was created.Additionally a notification module was added to it which notifies the drug company and public authorities about such adverse reaction from their drug. It was built using Tweepy API, and Natural Language Toolkit.

Pranav Kedia (IMT2015518), Anmol Saxena (V.I.T. University), Amit Amrutkar (TCS Pune) and Gobalakichenan G. (IBM Bangalore) participated in the Intel IOT Roads, which was held at MLR convention centre in Whitefield during March 19-20. They worked on a remote primary pet health monitoring device and were awarded a Basis smart watch. For details: https://twitter.com/IntelSoftwareIn/status/711418727359614976?lang=en

A faculty development program for Digital Signal Processing, a three day hands-on workshop organized by ACCS, was held during March 1-3. Dr. Donald Reay, Edinburg University conducted the workshop.

Spandan, the intra-collegiate sports fest, was held during March 4-6. Sports events such as Basketball, Football, Cricket, Badminton, LAN games and Gully Cricket were conducted like last year. Few new games were introduced this year such as 3-3 basketball games and one minute games. Community radio was introduced for the first time as part of the event. Musical night, Treasure hunt and Mini marathon also arranged as part of Spandan.

IIITB organized Civic-Tech Hackathon jointly with Janaagraha on March 12. Team Zense (Samyak Upadhyay (IMT2013039), Shivam Kumar (IMT2013042), Vikas Yadav (IMT2013060), Tadigadapa Abhiram (IMT2013051)) won the first prize. The jury was a 6 people (3 from Academia and 3 from Industry) panel, where Profs. Sujit Kumar, Amit Prakash, and Ramesh Sundaramanan represented IIITB.Coding for a better Bengaluru

To mark International Women's day that is celebrated worldwide on March 8, Women's cell and ISOC (Information Society Club) at IIITB organized a small celebration on March 23. Prof. Vanamala Viswanatha from Azim Premji University presided over the event that involved screening of the movie Mirch Masala. Following the movie screening, there was a group discussion, where Prof. Viswanatha, some faculty members from IIITB, and students discussed on current state of affairs pertaining to status of women in rural and low income groups.

On March 22, the portal for online applications for M.Tech. admissions, for both IT and ESD, went live. The application submissions for Master of Science by Research and Doctor of Philosophy programmes closed on March 22.

Holi was celebrated in the campus on March 24. Students, who belong to different parts of the country, came together to take part in the Holi celebrations, which was organized 5-7pm on the 24th.

On March 26, the Director, Prof. S. Sadagopan with the E-health Committee (Profs. T. K. Srikanth, Amit Prakash, and Jaya Sreevalsan Nair) met with the Director of NIMHANS, Prof. Dr. B. N. Gangadhar and his team to discuss on the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the two institutions.

Bhoomi Puja (ground-breaking ceremony) for the Infosys New Academic Block was held on March 31. The Board members, architects, contractor, and several faculty members joined the event.

Prof. Chetan Parikh presented a talk on "Enhancing Student Learning in Engineering Education" to the faculty of Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Amrita School of Engineering, Bengaluru on February 26. The talk discussed about moving current educational practices from a teacher-centric paradigm to a student-centric paradigm and presented some innovative methods for doing so.

Prof. Ashish Choudhury gave a public talk titled "Alice and Bob go Public: What Brings Diffie and Hellman Turing Award 2015" on March 16 at IIITB. The talk highlighted the work of 2015 Turing Award winners Whitfield Diffie and Martin Hellman and its impact.

Prof. Jyotsna Bapat gave a talk at RV College, Bangalore on "LTE: Introduction and Advances" on March 19.

Prof. V. Sridhar served as examiner of thesis of Fellow Programme (equivalent to Ph.D.), for the following external students:
Jha, A. (2015-2016) of Indian Institute of Management Calcutta, India, for thesis titled, "Innovation in IT Firms: Drivers, Activities and Outcomes."
Mukhopadhyay, S. (2015-2016) of Management Development Institute, Gurgaon, India, for thesis titled, "Control mechanisms in mobile ecosystem."
Birudavolu, S. (2015-2016) of Indian Institute of Foreign Trade, New Delhi, India, for thesis titled, "Open innovation in ICT: An empirical assessment of global telecommunication services."

There are new faces and roles on campus. Details of their joining:

March 1: Ms. Vijayeta Sharma, IIITB Innovation Center

Guest Talks

March 2: “Automata and logics for data and cost” by Dr. Amaldev Manuel, visiting faculty member at the Chennai Mathematical Institute, India.

March 9: "Scheduling in Large Scale Mobile Systems", by Dr. Joy Chandra Mukherjee, Research Associate in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India.

March 23: “Stochastic Models For System-Level Performance Analysis of Embedded Systems” byDr. Balaji Raman, formerly Research and Development Software Engineer at Mentor Graphics in the Grenoble area, France.

March 30: "Distributed Computation in Dynamic Networks", by Dr. Anisur Rahaman Molla, Postdoctoral Researcher in the Department of Computer Science at University of Freiburg, Germany.

Campus Visitors

March 3: Mr. Krishna Kumar, CEO of Mindtree.

March 7: A delegation from Japan consisting of Mr. Akihiko SHINOZAKI, Professor, Kyushu University, Japan, Mr. Keiji OKEGAWA, Deputy Director, Japan Productivity Centre and Mr. Yuki TANABE, Researcher, IFIT, Japan is visited us with an objective to understand the status of IT human resources, future strategy and to learn the latest initiatives on IT related policies and programmes in India for promotion of use of IT across various sectors.

March 12-25: Ms. Daw Mie Mie Khin, Pro-Rector, MIIT, Myanmar.

March 16: ABB R&D team.

March 21: A team of senior members from Huawei, R&D center visited to set up a joint innovation lab with IIITB in an area of mutual interest such SDN, Networking, IoT, etc.

March 22: A team from British Library Head of Asia and African Collection, headed by Dr. Catherine Eagleton.